EdSpace

We have just run our first Assembly - under the auspices of the additional funding made available to some Projects which participated in the Institutional Exemplars Programme 2007-2009.  This event was actually a mini Assembly, precursor to a larger event which we are planning for February 2010.

On Wednesday 4 November, 2009, we welcomed @15 guests to Southampton - all very well versed in the issues for Web 2.0 in resources for education.  The aim was to stimulate a discussion around the implications for the educational sector in recent Web 2.0 developments, and to take advantage of the assembled wisdom and expertise of the audience we attracted.  We were welcomed and introduced by Professor Hugh Davis, had Brian Kelly (UKOLN) for our keynote, Sarah Currier presented on her most recent Project - SHEENsharing;  Su White facilitated a discussion on metadata, Ali Dickens led a session which explored IPR and educational resources and Yvonne Howard rounded off the day with a short discussion on the functionality of individual’s favourite Web 2.0 service.

Our mini Assembly provided a good basis on which to focus for the larger event we are planning.  We are going to be aiming the next Assembly at people who are not already very experienced or knowledgeable in Web 2.0 for educational resources.  We aim to be advertising the event in the very near future and will be welcoming a lot of new faces to Southampton early in the new year.

Debra Morris

This time last year EdSpace took part in the University Learning and Teaching Week. The session introduced EdSpace as a project aiming to promote a culture of sharing learning resources across the University. It demoed  EdShare as a social site which will allow staff and students to upload resources, selectively share them and add comments. http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/115/  This year we are proud to have a University resource which has active usage within early adopter schools and a number of interesting features such as collections and notes to help people use it in creative ways. Last week was again University Learning and Teaching Week and we took the opportunity to have a panel session on Sharing Educational Content to start off the week’s dialogues.  Su White chaired the session with a full house of around 35 people.  Su set the scene illustrating some of the reasons people gave for not sharing their work. We started the panel  with a video from Dr Les Carr who was at the Acropolis at Athens for WebSci’09: Society On-Line.  He was appropriately taking the moral high ground on using Open Educational Resources http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/1939/ .

With my background in global digital libraries and in sharing institutional resources I looked at the parallels for sharing research, data and now educational resources and worldwide initiatives such as the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which were supporting them. Vicky Wright, Director of the University Language Centre, talked about the projects which helped develop high quality resources over the years and wondered about key incentives for sharing.  David Read, who has added some valuable resources about using zappers to EdShare,  talked about teachers and sharing and the satisfaction of knowing others have downloaded your work.   Hugh Davis, the Director of the EdShare work, was able to illustrate the downloads of EdShare resources up until now. Tom Randell, an academic from Psychology showed how it was worthwhile to spend the time depositing his teaching and how he had been pleased to be asked to make his work more  available for specific reasons by external people.

The last panel member was Debra Morris, who is project manager for EdShare but also the University library lead for e-learning. She gave her perspective as the library supported a variety of School activities particularly for more generic resources where it was sensible not to duplicate effort. There followed a spirited debate with copyright and effort versus visibility to the fore.

It is perhaps apt that today Caroline Wilson was recording her guest lecture   Law: The Universe and Everything?  The Regulation of the Web  for the COMP6037 Foundations in Web Science module.  I hope this coming together of disciplines in a more open environment will help foster collaboration and that this will be one of the lectures which will be available in EdShare  rather than just hidden within in its  course.

You can see another write up of this panel at: http://lateu.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/open-educational-resources/     We look forward to next year’s Learning and Teaching Week and the opportunity to discuss further progress at Southampton.

Jessie Hey

On 11 March I was invited along to a newly-formed University Group which has emerged from the 3 Graduate Schools associated with each of the faculties within the institution.  This Group has been formed to provide a strategic way to explore and understand work for supporting post-graduate research students and their supervisors, as well as to share and develop the range of resources being created across the University to support our post-graduate research community. 

HE in the United Kingdom is working hard at exploring ways to respond to the changing needs of research communities.  Similarly, as a University, we are developing new ways to engage with post-graduate researchers, supporting development of research supervisors and the contribution we have to make to developing the researchers of the present as well as the future.   A significant part of this work focuses on developing online materials, as well as presenting a range of existing services and resources in an appropriate and coherent context which makes them accessible and meaningful to our diverse community. 

The 11 people currently in the group are drawn from right across the institution - from Schools in all 3 Faculties and from services including the University Library and the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Unit (LATEU).  The group clearly draws on a range of creative, resourceful and determined people keen to ensure that we generate as much use from existing resources as possible. In addition, EdShare is being strongly supported in order to maximise future investment in development of materials, their visibility and ease of access for all members of the community, regardless of whether they are primarily campus-based or located more remotely.

EdShare was keenly discussed within the group - several people in attendance were already very familiar with our work, indeed have been early adopters and valued champions of the work of EdShare.  For others, this was the first opportunity they had had to explore the possibilities EdShare offers. Attention was drawn to EdShare’s lightweight approach: dispensing with the moderating role prior to uploading content which other learning and teaching repository instantiations support.  EdShare emphasises the institutional focus and Web 2.0 philosophy that it draws on - that, so far, it provides upload permission only to people who are members of the University of Southampton, and that this emphasises building confidence and trust within the institutional community to reassure and support less confident teachers to share materials.  Nevertheless, one academic was still interested to focus on the crucial role that “peer-review” has to play in the lifecycle of research outputs, encouraging EdShare to consider creating an equivalent/parallel process for learning and teaching resources. 

In EdShare, we will continue to explore these issues as we work on the next stages of developing our partnerships with specific groups.  Two specific issues emerging from this meeting for us are: 

• possible differences for supporting sharing amongst teachers of undergraduates as against research postgraduate students;
• concerns of teachers working within historically, well-established disciplines as against concerns of teachers in new and emergent disciplines.  

We have been working on enhancing the frontpage of EdShare.  The new look was unveiled at the end of last week.  We have also been looking at the overall presentation of specific features for the user interface.  Having mapped out our final workplan for the last month of the JISC-funded section on this Project, we are still really comfortable with the way our work is going.  The regular, weekly team see us gather (8 core team members) in Hugh Davis’ office: we share ideas, review completed work, explore options and prioritise the week/month ahead.  We have all been really consistent and committed to the need for, and function of, this meeting.  As a consequence, our team working climate is really healthy and enables us to continue the conversations and discussions beyond the Monday 12:00-1:00 - whenever we bump into each other in the Lab, in the Staff Club, or if we need to convene an extra meeting of some kind.  

One of the new features we have linked from the Login page on EdShare, is a survey - we are gathering lots of evidence and feedback from our user community.  We are interested in experience, attitudes, preferences, desires, likes and dislikes - all useful material for the research papers and conference presentations currently being drafted by the team.  The data we are collecting is both quantitative as well as qualitative.  One recent (unsolicited) testimonial is:    

“This is great! Certainly brilliant for courses taught by several academics. I’m probably going to use it as a cloud service for all of my teaching material instead of my hard drive At least I know it’s safe and I can access it from anywhere.”

We are interested, of course, in the motivations for teachers to share their resources, as well as in the relationship that this has to our existing institutional services for learning and teaching - be they hard drives, shared servers, VLEs or intranets. 

Earlier this week, we were in discussion with our institutional IT infrastructure providers - iSolutions.  In the next few days, we will be working jointly with iSolutions colleagues to draft a paper.  Our intention is to put down a marker for our strategy to migrate the emerging EdShare service to the position of a core educational service within the University.  Another really significant milestone for our work here at Southampton!  We are continuing our usual day-to-day work of meetings with specific academic groups to build engagement and to attract more of the kinds of declarations quoted above!   

There has been a lot of activity recently in the OER area – the community is really engaging around the issues for the 14/08 JISC call.  In addition, the Scott Leslie, SCOPE 3 week online seminar on OER has been interesting to dip into - http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2661

Lorna’s JISC Cetis blog,  http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/ has been a real source of practical information again.  Interesting to see the discussion on 3/2 about the lightweight metadata mandate for the OER Call.  One of the core pillars for the EdSpace Project at Southampton has been that of developing a lightweight, low threshold level for adding content.

Interestingly, Lorna’s later posting on 3/2 raises the question of the relationship between blogging and micro-blogging – linking between these 2 social networking activities, and indeed the ethics of linking.  What exciting times!

Jessie Hey and I have been attending a whole range of meetings across the institution over the past year especially to engage our community with the Edshare resource our Project is developing.  The most recent event we have attended was a Faculty Education Committee meeting for one of the 3 Faculty groups within the University. 

Our presentation certainly provoked a wide-ranging discussion.  One of the things we have noticed over the course of the year has been the issues that people readily engage with more swiftly now than right at the start of the work – we discussed issues relating to subject-based learning and teaching repositories, licences to associate with deposited material, providing opportunities for comments on deposited material, linking to institutional policies on rewards and recognition for learning and teaching – the Ebay feedback model was specifically mentioned in this context.  In addition, this group was interested in sustainability of and dissemination for EdShare; quality issues for the content presented within EdShare and finally, one of the student representatives at this meeting raised the question of W3C compliance for the design of the interface that we are working on.   This final issue was really pleasing – that our students are not only engaging with the work that we are doing but are also raising the kinds of issues that must be core to our work.    

Very interesting recent outbreak of discussion on the JISC-Repositories discussion list - thread - List for learning object repositories? The starting point was a question from Fred Riley, Learning Technologist at the University of Nottingham.  Fred’s question was explicitly to discover the existence or otherwise of a list for discussing learning and teaching repository issues.  (I must admit that this has been a slight puzzle to me since becoming part of the repository community back in October 2007.)  Sarah Currier helped a lot of us by indicating that this work sits with:  CETIS-METADATA@JISCMAIL.AC.UK.  In no time at all, the discussion developed into a really interesting exploration of the common interests of research and learning & teaching repositories - and on into a broader exchange about OA, metadata, policies, governance, versioning, schema, workflows and services. 

Les Carr made some extremely useful contributions to the discussion, exploring the work we are doing here with EdShare as well as identifying a really core issue for us which is to understand whether or not there are truly any fundamental differences between the requirements of research and learning and teaching repositories.   One issue would seem to be the matter of making resources within the repository visible - a prime concern for EdShare - and it may not be a coincidence that a lot of this discussion took place on the day of the JISC briefing meeting for the Open Educational Resources Call 14/08.

I’ve even posted a contribution myself, after feeling suitably provoked by a post which emphasised the extent to which learning and teaching repositories have been national rather than institutional in focus.  

The EdSpace team held an awayday on Tuesday 13 January 2009.  10 members of the wider EdSpace team - technical team members as well as Project team members - met in the University’s Highfied LATEU Training Room.  This venue, while being on campus and right in the heart of the University of Southampton, offers us a close and easy-to-reach location away from our day-to-day work bases.

Our main focus was to explore, identify and agree the work priorities for the immediate coming period of the Edspace Project.

We have 2 and a bit months of JISC-funded time to go and we need to ensure that we are not only going to deliver on what we said we would do, but also to identify other areas of potential work which we have learned about and increased our awareness of during the course of the Project life.

Our main focuses were:

To migrate the appropriate tested and stable functionality for EdShare version 1.3;

Explore use cases and prototypes for appropriate linking between EdShare and the institutional VLE;

Report on EdSpace’s understanding of the concept of versioning within the educational domain;

Report on EdSpace’s understanding of educational schemas and implications for future working;

Develop a useful and creative partnership between the EdSpace Project and the Faroes Project (also at the University of Southampton and funded by JISC).  This partnership while recognising and respecting the separate influences, interests and discipline communities of each of the Projects, will aim to build on the philosophies and shared location for the benefit of the wider academic community; 

Report on the University’s developing approach to the educational agenda with particular reference to technology enabled learning; 

Continue to understand and influence the institutional approach to IPR and copyright in educational resources developed by University staff;

Finally, we also reviewed the latest JISC invitations to tender - 12/08 and 14/08 - which are relevant to our area of work to identify possible future opportunities and new areas of work for us.

We had a really good day and achieved a lot.  We have a nice selection of tasks and range of work to continue to look at, and in addition to focussing on immediate and short term activities, we are also engaging with  longer term, future areas for development which is exciting as well!

We finished the day with a curry at a local restaurant - the poppadoms were crisp, the pilau light and the team content!

Debra Morris 

Lou McGill has led a team in producing a new report for JISC: a study on the evidence base for sharing learning resources.  Hugh Davis and I (Debra Morris) contributed to the report and it is available at: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/265/.

In particular, the report provides some real insights to possible future business cases and models for national, sectoral, institutional and individual engagement with sharing and collaboration around learning and teaching resources for the UK. 

10 December 2008, Jessie Hey and I (Debra Morris) went off to the University of Manchester to attend the Jorum Forum.  Phil Barker has blogged this event as well: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/2008/12/10/jorum-forum/#more-60

An event to engage and encourage  the Higher Education and Further Education community to make visible, share, and re-use resources for teaching and learning.  This event is very much in the space that we are working in, with EdShare, at Southampton. It’s been a big year for Jorum – the announcement of the 3 services in development from April 2008 signposted the emergence of Jorum Open.  Having identified Jorum as a key, national initiative that we would link with in the original EdSpace JISC bid, I was pleased to meet Jackie Carter in Belfast at the JISC-CNI Conference back in July 2008.  Jackie encouraged us to visit the Manchester team and we were please to arrange attendance at the first Jorum Forum.  In addition, Nicola Siminson arranged for Jessie and I to have a meeting with her and Senior Development Officer, Laura Shaw the following day as well.  So, we were among 40+ attendees on Wednesday – from all across FE and HE, JISC bodies etc.

Significant elements for us were:  understanding the early stages and emerging issues for the new Jorum Community – and the role of the Community Bay in informing this development.  Also identifying just how Open, JorumOpen will be and if the resources it presents will be fully Googleable; will the metadata for the other Jorum spaces be Googleable? – Jorum Education UK and JorumPlus – even if the content is not freely accessible. Discussion touched on the issues relating to linking to content in Jorum as well as hosting resources locally. There was interesting coverage of licence issues – Creative Commons and other forms.  Also exploration of hidden benefits and perceived barriers to sharing resources across the community and Mary Jane Steer talked about the range of Jorum metadata fields, classification schemas, browsing tools and the division of responsibilities between contributors and cataloguers.  Fleur Corfield from Staffordshire University shared valuable experience of working across a consortium of local colleges and her University.  She mentioned many areas of interest to EdShare – links with the institutional VLEs, institutional policies and procedures, as well as engagement with institutional senior management for understanding and support.

Richard  Goddard gave a swift and interesting presentation on MrCute – MrCute2 will allow searching and direct linking between Jorum Open  and local Moodle repositories.  We will be exploring whether we can do something similar for the VLE we have here in Southampton and EdShare.

When we met Nicola and Laura on Thursday morning, we shared thoughts about the common interests that our work has, how we can develop more understanding across our work and what timescales we are working to for Edshare.  We will be contacting the Jorum team again in early January and look forward to some helpful collaboration.